macblaze.ca

I so want to build one of these. It would amuse me for hours and hours.

Interactive Topographic

Apparently its based on a Kinnect and Xbox. Here are the instructions to build your own!

See this one as well:

So cool!

I had (have had, and will likely continue to have) a discussion about what makes a writer, or a singer or a photographer. An -er of some sort. While my views have refined themselves over the years I still hold (mostly) to a definition I came up with in University. An -er is someone who not only produces something, but also maintains a relationship — of a two-way sort — with an audience. There are all sorts of quibbles, exceptions, misunderstandings and outright illogic about it, especially when you talk about/add in things like ego, volume vs quality, the difference between art and craft and what makes a teacher a teacher and not just a teacher. But mostly I stick to it. As Mssr. Henderson of Chilliwack put it, “…if there’s no audience, there just-a ain’t no show. Whoa, whoa.”

By this definitions Emily Dickinson was not a poet (or poeter as I like to call them). When I repeat that, it generally makes Leslie cringe.

Banksy, on the other hand, is all sorts of -er. I don’t know what other people think about that.

In memory of the recent passing of Leonard Nimoy I present my favourite Star Trek memory. Actually it isn’t about the show at all. When we were kids (probably Grades 5 or 6) we got these Star Trek guns that shot tiny disks and we spent hour upon hour pelting each other and ourselves with them. One of the good things about 3 boys all within a year or two of each other. It was war and there were no unfair advantages, there was only cunning and the killer instinct.

  

I had started this post almost two years ago when something reminded me of those guns but I didn’t look too hard and just saved it as a draft for later. The final death of Spock reminded me I had it in the to-do pile so I dug it up and started anew. Googling didn’t bring up much (even in Wikipedia there was hardly anything), but I did come across this blog post that sums up a lot of my feelings:

One of the best memories of my young childhood was playing a game that we simply called “guns.” The battlefield was the whole suburban neighborhood … every yard, half-built new house, vacant lot and wooded lot … and we’d play for hours at a time. Liberals and other peace nits are going to send me hate mail now. Yes, I grew up playing with toy guns, pretending to “kill” my friends and … surprise! I’ve never shot or killed anyone in real life, I’ve never robbed a liquor store with a toy gun and I don’t have the urge to wail and cry my heart out over a tree that’s just been cut down so I believe that I grew up (reasonably) normal.

…

The Tracer Gun was a simple though novel idea, load a toy gun with twenty flat aerodynamic plastic discs, squeeze the trigger and a spring loaded flicker arm (kind of like a clay pigeon thrower) would be pulled back to a certain point and then released with a violence all of its own. This flicker arm would be flung forward striking the first plastic aerodynamic disc off the top of the spring loaded 20 disc magazine. When the spring arm made contact with the aerodynamic disc, it would send it spinning down the flat tracks inside the round barrel. The aerodynamic disc was basically an air foil and would leave the barrel like a Frisbee, buzzing towards your intended target and floating through the air at a speed that was, generally, a little faster than any but the fastest kids could outrun or dodge. Fat kids went down without a hitch and you didn’t have to lead them as much as you did the quicker, more agile skinny kids.

—Angst & Speed

Man, we must of killed each other a bajillion times with those things. Until I did some research for this post I hadn’t ever realized there were non-Star Trek versions, so to me, the basement slaughters have always been associated with the TV show. There was even a rifle version. And (as I recall) it was a self-cleaning toy, as you needed to collect all the disks so you had more ammo for more mayhem. No mess for Mom.

 

I guess a lot of the Star Trek purists might be mildly appalled that Star Trek to me is about guns and slaughter, but then I was always a Kirk boy; I never could understand why they gave Picard a ship. 🙂

 

There are still some of these guns around — toy collectors and such — many, as you can see from the pictures, still in their original packaging. Not ours. Ours were well loved and well-abused. And we never did put anyone’s eye out.

 

 

 

A few years back C came across a website called The Aesthetics of Joy. It is a ongoing project from a woman named Ingrid Fetell.

This is the bio from her website:

ingrid fetell

My work explores the emotional relationships between people and things, particularly the basic objects we interact with every day. Many of these interactions are unthinking—the way we sink into a chair or grasp a cup—and my goal is simply to expose the emotionality inherent in the material action. On a deeper level, I’m interested in the dialogue between objects and our long-term emotional well-being. Much has been said about the unhealthy culture of consumption in modern life, and I believe part of the solution lies in designing products that are emotionally satisfying in a more durable way

Just the name delights me. Life should be about joy and, as a visual person, the idea of joy having an aesthetic should have been a foregone conclusion, yet I never thought of it that way. I discovered her site about the same time that Sony Bravia released their commercial/short film with 250,000 colourful balls bouncing down the streets and hills of San Francisco. It’s delightful if you’ve never seen it.

I am not sure of the cause and effect relationship between Aesthetics of Joy and the Sony commercial — I may have just seen it on her site or C may have pointed them both out to me at the same time — but they are now both inextricably linked to my mental images of joy. So take some time and watch the video and wander through her site. And check out the making of video too.

And embrace the joy.

.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common format for text files in computers and on the Internet. In an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined. It is what is often refereed to as text (as opposed to code) when referring to email or file types.

Back in the late 60s people started to use the symbols to make drawings. These eventually evolved into high art.

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ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
—Wikipedia

A lot of us will remember these from the local carnival (The Calgary Stampede in my case) booths that took your picture then printed it out using text.

This is not me. I can’t find mine.

But there are tons of great images out there and you can do all sorts of weird things with them. For example if you want see a nekkid lady you can find one buried in the source code of this post. (See here if you don’t know how.)

The possibilities are endless. See Chris.com’s ASCII Art page for literally hundreds of cool drawings.

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